Award Recipients

2026 Tony Winsor Award Recipient: Jessica Goldhirsch, MPH, MSW, LICSW   

Jessica Goldhirsch, MPH, MSW, LICSW is a palliative care social worker with Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Dana Farber Cancer Institute's Department of Supportive Oncology.   Having grown up in a family of immigrants and refugees, she heard many languages and was exposed to a variety of cultures during her youth.  This rich environment led her to devote her career to highlighting the importance of language and culture and in the setting of health care. As a strong advocate for linguistic and cultural access to care, Jessica created and managed an interpreter services department at a community hospital.  She then became a trainer for a large academic medical center's department of interpreter services. After completing her master's degree in social work, she continued to develop continuing education programming for professional medical interpreters. She focuses on cultivating partnerships between clinicians and interpreters through facilitated dialogues which help to mitigate the power dynamics leading to improved working relationships. 

Ms Goldhirsch has published and presented nationally and internationally on innovative medical interpreter training including the multi-year series Dialogues in Palliative Care. Ms Goldhirsch is a member of Brigham and Women’s Hospital Ethics Committee, National Council on Interpreting in Health Care, Social Work Hospice and Palliative Care Network, and she is co-chair of the Palliative Care and Hospice Social Workers of Massachusetts. She is grateful to the late Cambodian interpreter Sokha Diep and to Dr Janet Abrahm both of whom have mentored her and provided her with the space and structure to engage in creative education modalities. Finally, she is grateful to all of the interpreters with whom she has worked and trained who have taught her much and enriched her life. 

Yilu Ma, MS, MA, CMI, is the Director of the Interpreter Services Department at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital and, since early 2024, concurrently overseeing Brigham and Women’s Faulkner Hospital Interpreter Services. During his 15-year tenure at the Brigham, Interpreter Services has undergone a transformation, continuously expanding its reach and influence from less than 40,000 encounters a year in 2011 to over 250,000 now, largely due to its significant investments in technology, while holding in-person interpreting steady and strong. A passionate, decades-long advocate for the status and profile of medical interpreters, he tirelessly educates clinicians, executive leaders and other stakeholders on the essential roles of interpreters, translators and the profession. Interpreter Services never misses a single International Translation Day annual celebration, where hospital leaders and colleagues recognize and congratulate the teams. Yilu consistently pushes for team building, investing heavily on interpreters’ professional development and growth at national conferences and events. Over the past seven years, Interpreter Services teamed up with Palliative Care Team to host monthly conversations and dialogues with clinicians on various cultural and linguistic topics in patient care, the outcomes and achievements of which were published in a professional journal. Thanks to these efforts, interpreters feel ever more confident to speak out, empower themselves as equal members of the care team and so acknowledged and respected by their colleagues. While remote interpreting being a valuable back-up option, particularly in the midst of the pandemic, to Yilu, it can never be equated with in-person interpreting by this staff who know their patients and deliver most compassionate care to their patients. He envisions that professional interpreters will surely play a bigger role in written translations as technology and AI loom larger. To improve interpreting access and quality of care, he collaborated with physicians, nurses, safety and quality staff in designing and implementing a variety of programs; NRC patient data has consistently ranked the Brigham more than 30 percent above their national peers. Under his leadership, his departments have won an array of awards and prizes, including the Brigham Way, Brigham Lotus award, QUEST, iCARE, etc.

As the former Treasurer and board member of the IMIA from 2006-2010, he played a key role in hosting national conferences in Boston, amplifying interpreters’ message, growing its membership, and pioneering professionalization. He was one of the earliest SMEs in testing, designing the NBCMI certifications. To recognize his contributions, he was granted the IMIA service award.

A former adjunct professor at Cambridge College and Boston University, Yilu has trained hundreds of medical interpreters and translators, teaching extensively on interpreting, translation and cross-cultural communication courses. He presented nationally at Paving the Way and IMIA conferences.

Yilu co-compiled and published the New-Age Chinese-English Dictionary in 2000, by the Commercial Press and recently his piece “Call Me Dr. XXX!” was published by Narrative Inquiry in Bioethics. As an editor of the Heart & Science, a publication of the Brigham, he contributed and wrote on intercultural communication, interdisciplinary collaboration and the roles of medical interpreters in bridging the linguistic and cultural gaps.

Before the current position, Yilu was the Director of the Interpreter Services Department at Tufts Medical Center, and prior to this, the Manager of the Interpreter Services Department at Boston Medical Center. A very experienced medical interpreter himself, he has interpreted in most major hospitals in Boston. Yilu is also a competent simultaneous interpreter, with years of experience in conference interpreting. He holds a BA in British and American literature; a post-graduate degree in linguistics from Beijing Foreign Studies University; an MA in international relations from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Tufts University; and an MS in computer science from River College.

Nina Scott, MSHS, CMI-Spanish is the Director of Interpreter Services at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, an instructor and language coach for the Massachusetts Medical Interpreting Training Course via ForHealth Consulting at UMass Chan Medical School and is a member of the Forum on the Coordination of Interpreter Services (FOCIS). Previously, Nina served as an instructor for the Medical Interpreting Course at Boston University, as Manager of Interpreter Services at McLean Hospital and as a board member of FOCIS and worked as a medical interpreter at UMass Memorial Medical Center and Shriners Hospitals for Children-Boston. Nina has a BA in International Cultures and Economics from Bentley College and a MS in Management in Human Services from the University of Massachusetts-Boston.

Zarita Araujo-Lane, MSW, LICSW has 25 plus years of experience and is recognized as one of the leading presenters on cross-cultural communication tools for small and large institutions servicing an array of professionals working in educational and healthcare fields. Ms. Araújo-Lane has been invited to present and conduct national and international trainings on cross-cultural topics and medical interpreting to both large and small groups, using creative tools such as case scenarios and storytelling, and has vast experience working with cross-cultural populations in medical and mental health organizations.

Zarita Araujo-Lane, MSW, LICSW has 25 plus years of experience and is recognized as one of the leading presenters on cross-cultural communication tools for small and large institutions servicing an array of professionals working in educational and healthcare fields. Ms. Araújo-Lane has been invited to present and conduct national and international trainings on cross-cultural topics and medical interpreting to both large and small groups, using creative tools such as case scenarios and storytelling, and has vast experience working with cross-cultural populations in medical and mental health organizations.

She is the president and founder of Cross Cultural Communication Systems, Inc. ™ (CCCS, Inc.™), a small woman- and minority-owned business since 1996, with 18 staff members and over 200 on-call interpreters and translators. CCCS, Inc.™ provides qualified cultural-linguistic services to healthcare, educational, legal, and business by creating a seamless environment of teamwork and collaboration between customers, freelancers, and staff members while delivering innovative, respectful, and reliable quality interpretation, translation, and training services to a diverse population with regional, organizational and individual needs.

Ms. Araujo-Lane was the director of a mental health cross-cultural team for over ten years at Health and Education Services in the North Shore area of Massachusetts. She has published articles on cross-cultural management including chapters written in 1996 and 2005 on “Portuguese Families” for the second and third editions of the book, Ethnicity and Family Therapy, by Monica McGoldrick. In addition, she was the main developer for Videos and Manual on Medical and Mental Health Interpreting.